[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

I thought I'd start a new thread for this:

Jupiter Encounter Begins
January 10, 2007

[dvandorn]

Whereas we in Minneapolis get NASA-TV on our cable system, even though our cable system has been through two ownership changes in the past 10 years (local company Paragon bought by Time-Warner, which then sold out to Comcast in a shady "we'll give you this market if you give us another market" deal).

I'm told we get NASA-TV because one of the local high schools insists on having it available and actually uses its own satellite dish to pull it in. They then share the feed with the cable company. I was concerned that we would lose NASA-TV forever here when it went digital (requiring a somewhat pricey new decoder box to pull in), but it's still on 24/7 in Minneapolis proper.

Now, if we could just get the programmers in Houston to give us a little more variety in programming -- we seem to get an *awful* lot of the kiddie programming (including one called "An Astronaut's Life" or somesuch, which features Sunni Williams prominently with no explanation as to how she's on a stage at MSC and at the same time is the FE on the ISS... ). We also get nothing all night (at least some of the time) but interviews with the crew of whichever Shuttle flight is next up, which is fine -- except it's *all* they run overnight, sometimes, for several months prior to a flight. It gets a little old after the 40th or 50th time you've seen it.

I'm an old guy, I admit (51 years young last birthday), but I would really like to see more of the films made of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights back in the 60's and 70's. Every once in a while we get one of them, but not often enough for me...

However, it *is* nice to get the press conferences, even if I have to wait for them to be re-run sometimes. I was very pleased to see and hear Alan Stern and John Spencer, both active posters to our little forum, being so delightfully enthusiastic about the Jupiter encounter. I wonder a bit, though, if Alan's statement about how we just can't get as much science out of NH as possible because we can't afford a Voyager-sized staff for it might have been aimed at members of the new Congress...

-the other Doug